Spiritual Spring Cleaning

When the weather turns to Spring-like warmth during the day and lengthening opportunities of sunshine, does part of your brain turn to “spring cleaning”? As this was a routine of my life when growing up, spring cleaning has certainly come to my mind early this year along with the wonderful weather. As much as I want to spend more time outside our home cleaning up, I also need to pay attention to sprucing up inside the house.

Focus More on Growing

As we come to the end of Lent and head into Holy Week, the weather coincides perfectly with the thought of spring cleaning our spiritual home: ourselves! We should be eying our spiritual habits and lives with a slightly more discerning view than we typically do at other times of the year. We pray for guidance to take on a Lenten discipline – abstaining (fasting) from something that may take our focus away from God and/or taking on something that we hope to help us focus more on growing our relationship with God. This is the clean up opportunity of our spiritual home, and it often creates more of a mess or chaos in our routines – which is similar to when we take on a cleaning project around the house. But we keep at it because we are looking forward to the end result being better (cleaner, less clutter) than what we had previously. We want our spiritual selves to be more presentable to celebrate the risen Christ at Easter!

Preparing Ourselves

Perhaps the best opportunity to put the ‘final touches’ on preparing ourselves for that celebration is participating in Holy Week. Walking along with each other, together with Jesus, opens our eyes even further to the fine details in our spiritual lives that we might need to address. Participating in Holy Week we transition and transform: from shouting “Hosannah!” to screaming “Crucify!” – from the joy of singing “Gloria” to humbly allowing our feet to be washed to intimately share in Christ’s Body and Blood only to abandon Jesus – from acknowledging the Cross to leaving in silence.

Christ Cleanses Us

When we follow Jesus as He walks to His death, Christ cleanses us as we allow Him into our hearts. Although this is true throughout the year, take on the opportunity to offer yourself, your heart… and this spring cleaning will result in a deeper and broader relationship with God that will make Easter that much more of a celebration.

Deacon Terry Garner